Random Thoughts from the Shitshow - Cheney, RFK Jr., Gambling and More!

RANDOM THOUGHTS

From the ‘random thoughts’ bin in my Dispatches from the Shitshow notebook.

A few people asked me if I was going to watch the big presidential debate on Tuesday night. The answer of course is…HELL NO!

I didn’t watch the Trump-Biden debate back when Biden tripped over his own dementia addled dick and I ain’t gonna watch this idiotic horseshit either. Why would anyone in their right mind watch these two raging sub-mediocrities and dim-to-mid-wits babble their inane bullshit back and forth?

I felt the same way about the conventions. How could anyone watch that shit by choice? It’s like tuning in to television just to watch a three-hour block of infomercials. You can’t help but be dumber for having watched.

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If you needed another reason to not vote – both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are endorsing Kamala Harris.

Cheney and Bush are war criminals who stole the 2000 election, were either responsible due to negligence for, or complicit in, the 9-11 attacks, lied to start two illegal wars that killed millions, started a torture and massive surveillance program, ran the U.S. economy into the ground, and decimated working families while bailing out Wall Street bankers.

These two men are, frankly, evil to the point of being demonic. To be clear, they should not be in prison for their crimes, they should be at the end of a fucking rope.

That their endorsement of the Democratic nominee is not seen as a giant red flag to the vast majority of liberals in the U.S., is disconcerting, disheartening and should be disqualifying.

Liberals tell me that Trump is Hitler…but they fail to remember that Cheney and Bush actually were as Hitlerian as any president in history.

If you are one of those delusional folks who think Kamala Harris is the one to right the good ship U.S. of A…consider the utterly contemptible and loathsome swamp creatures that are backing her.

I’m not saying you should vote for Trump…I’m just saying that voting for Kamala isn’t the lesser of two evils, it is, at the barest of minimums, the equal of evils.

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True story - I know a guy who got crabs on his birthday.

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I know it is en vogue to think that RFK Jr. is a clown…and I get it…he talks like Katherine Hepburn with a head cold and hiccups. But even with the liability of his addled speech, he still speaks more sense than both Trump and Harris combined.

The fact that he is out there brazenly berating and beating the righteous drum against big pharma and big agriculture, says a lot about him and his integrity, and even more about Trump and Harris’ lack thereof.

Liberals, of course, loathe RFK Jr. for speaking out against the Covid vaccine…as well as many other vaccines…but the reality is that RFK Jr. was right – about the Covid vaccine and much else, and the vast majority of liberals were dead wrong, especially regarding Covid, even though they are loathe to admit it.

I certainly don’t agree with RFK Jr. on everything…most particularly his nauseating subservience to Israel – but both Trump and Harris are equally spineless and mindless when it comes to Israel too (gee…I wonder why?).

That said, the fact that Trump is now surrounding himself with the likes of RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom have endorsed him, and saying he will put them in his administration, is a very big deal considering the villainous scum who populated the first swamp creature-infested Trump term. John Fucking Bolton was his National Security Advisor for crissakes!

When I look at Bush and Cheney endorsing Kamala, and RFK Jr. and Gabbard endorsing Trump, it seems very obvious to me that Trump wins the endorsement battle by a landslide.

Having RFK Jr. fighting big pharma and big agriculture in the public eye for the next four years would be good for the country. Of course, the question becomes could Trump tolerate someone stealing the spotlight from him for four years? My guess is no…and that the relationship would sour pretty quick.

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I know I am an old man yelling for the kids to get off of my lawn, but I really, really hate the proliferation of sports gambling in our culture, and think it is insidious, diabolical and dangerous.

I am not a gambler. I don’t even play fantasy sports – another endeavor that I find to be idiotic and detrimental to sport and sports fandom.

The bottom line is that I think that gambling is so toxic and such a cancer that it will eventually aggressively degrade not only individuals, families, communities and the country, but sports itself, as everything that touches gambling is tainted by it and ultimately greatly diminished.

Nowadays it’s simply impossible to watch television without seeing some stupid DraftKings or FanDuel commercial, and all of the networks covering sports have fully embraced gambling as THE focal point of their coverage of sport. ESPN has entire shows dedicated to gambling and has started their own sportsbook, and during actual games they spotlight bets to make.

Kids growing up today will have no idea about sports without gambling being such an integral part of it. Sports and gambling will be inextricably linked for this generation, and it will have dire consequences for those kids when they become adults, and for sports in the future.

The proliferation of sports betting comes nearly forty years after the Reagan administration took the guard rails off of Wall Street, and twenty-five years after Clinton essentially allowed Wall Street to become a massive casino.

We’ve all seen how well those changes to Wall Street have worked out for regular, working-class Americans…it’s been one calamity after another. We’ve had Savings and Loan scandals, Tech bubbles, accounting scandals (Enron), the housing bubble, the housing crash and on and on and on. No matter who was responsible for those crimes and calamities, it was always regular people who were left holding the bag and footing the bill.

In 2008 the entire façade of Wall Street was exposed as being fraudulent and entirely felonious. The banks, the ratings agencies, the insurance companies, the mortgage companies, the federal oversight agencies, the local, city, state and federal law enforcement and attorney’s general, all of them were exposed for the world to see…and yet…nothing changed. In fact, Wall Street only got bigger and more corrupt and now is even more untouchable, and regular people were robbed blind and left poorer and more vulnerable than ever.

The same thing will happen over time with gambling in regards to professional sports leagues, college sports, television networks, tech companies and credit card companies/banks – as they will all make gobs of money…until they don’t, and then they’ll simply use their massive money machine to pay off corrupt politicians and get bailed out with tax payers dollars. And once again it will be regular people who will be fucked over.

You can bet on it.

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Speaking of getting fucked over….I know people are freaking out about the election. The MAGA maniacs thinks Kamala is a commie and the K-Hive Clowns think Trump is Hitler…but know this…no matter who wins the U.S. will get heinous neo-liberal domestic policies and hellacious neo-con foreign policy.

Trump or Harris…it don’t matter…we are fucked four ways to Sunday. The U.S. empire is in steep decline and will be lashing out at enemies foreign and domestic…and if you think you’re safe because you’re on the “right side of history” or are a “patriot”…guess again.

The bullseye will eventually be on all of our backs because the corrupt oligarchs and aristocrats running this country don’t just hate regular Americans, they actually want to see us suffer because they delight and live off of our misery. These ghouls will do absolutely anything to maintain their power, up to and including putting a bullet in the back of your head after having forced you to buy your own shovel and dig your own grave.

On that joyous note…I’ll sign off.

©2024

The Trump Legal Charade and Other Uncomfortable Truths

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 49 seconds

I loathe Donald Trump with the fury of a thousand suns but it seems obvious to me as someone aligned with neither political party, that the legal cases against him are third world, banana republic level political warfare manufactured to thwart his political ambitions.

This is the sort of legal maneuvering that the CIA routinely works overseas to knee cap political opposition to the corporate stooge they placed in power.

Make no mistake, Trump is a scumbag and a charlatan but the same could be said for every single president in my lifetime.

Bush and Cheney lied us into an illegal war that killed millions and ran a torture program and illegally spied on Americans. No charges. Obama willfully murdered Americans without trial. No charges. Wall Street honchos and their lackeys in government willfully defrauded the American public for billions if not trillions with the housing bubble and subsequent collapse, and not a single one of them was held “accountable” for their crimes. And yet, people celebrate when Trump gets convicted of this manufactured, pissant bullshit? Can people really be that gullible, that controllable and that stupid? I guess so.

Trump’s conviction isn’t about “holding a president accountable!”, it’s about inoculating the corrupt establishment from legal consequences by punishing a loudmouthed incompetent for deviating from the script (but not the narrative) and daring to disrespect the deep state. Charging and convicting Trump and not Bush, Obama and the bevy of bad boy Wall Streeters is the point and is meant as a way to rub any thinking person’s nose in shit.

Understand that Trump is meant to be a scapegoat (in the Girardian/classical sense - although certainly not an innocent) upon which the establishment can throw its sins and cathartically cleanse themselves in the eyes of the public through his legal crucifixion.

For example, the fact that Trump is facing prison for paying hush money to a whore while war criminals Dubya and Cheney bask in the glow of liberal love, is frankly, horrifying and extraordinarily revealing about the state of our country and the vacuous, vapid and venal nature of 21st century liberals. The fact that Trump is an icon of the right to begin with says the very same thing about modern-day Republicans.

Another note on Trump is that the big selling point for Democrats and Biden is that Trump is a threat to democracy…which is hysterical. What “democracy” exactly?

I think Trump is less a threat to our alleged “democracy” than the people in both parties who keep third parties off of ballots and allow corporations and Israel to meddle unabated in our elections and government.  

A line I often hear from Democrats is that this could be our last election because Trump won’t leave office if he wins. This is moronic. Trump is an actor…and just because he improvises his lines doesn’t mean he’ll change the storyline.

Do people not remember that Trump was president already…and many claimed he wouldn’t leave office then too…and yet…he isn’t president anymore. He left office. The retort to that fact is often “he didn’t concede”. What does that even mean, really? He left office…so who cares if he “concedes”? Do Super Bowl losers have to concede the game before the trophy is handed out? No. The game was played and the score is the score even if the loser doesn’t like it.

And speaking of the fact that Trump was already president…any dope that still thinks he is some outsider who will drain the swamp needs to be institutionalized if not lobotomized. Trump ran the first time, and is doing it again, as the ultimate outsider…and in a way he is...but not really. What he really is, is the ultimate outsider among insiders…like an uncouth dinner guest who shits on the duck l’orange.

The most repulsive thing about Trump, and there’s a lot to choose from, is that he ran as a man who’d drain the swamp but when elected stuffed his administration chock full of the most vile and corrupt, swampiest swamp creatures who have ever existed.

As for Biden…those delusional dingbats who think he’s doing a great job and that the economy is robust and that he is some kindly, dignified statesman, are even dumber than the MAGA morons.

Biden is a dementia-addled shitbag who is one of the most corrupt politicians of the last 60 years…which is quite an accomplishment considering the array of assholes who’ve held office.

The bottom line is it actually doesn’t matter in the least who wins the election because the brutish, barbaric beast will continue slouching towards Bethlehem and the decadent and morally diseased American Empire will continue its decay and decline leading to its inevitable collapse. And regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, know this, that every member of the ruling class, including the president, aren’t indifferent to your plight…no…they actually actively hate you and desperately wish you and your family great harm.

Understand that when you are voting in November you aren’t choosing a leader, you’re simply casting the lead for the clown-show that is American politics and whom you want to see on your tv every night. You can either have the corrupt, senile scumbag or the corrupt, blowhard carnival barker.

Regardless of how Trump’s legal issues play out or who gets the most votes in November, the bottom line is that no matter who wins, we all will lose.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

The Mauritanian: A Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A great story but not so great movie. Not worth paying to see but its subject matter is crucially important and makes the film worthy of a watch when it becomes available on a streaming service for free.

The Mauritanian, directed by Kevin Macdonald, tells the true story of Mohamedou Salahi, who in the wake of 9-11 was tortured and held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay detention camp for 14 years without charge.

The film, which as of March 2nd is in theaters and available on Video-On-Demand, is adapted from Salahi’s memoir Guantanamo Diary, and stars Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodly and Benedict Cumberbatch.

The Mauritanian is a great story, but unfortunately not a particularly great film. Despite some effective moments, particularly the torture sequences, and a solid performance from Tahar Rahim as Salahi, it’s a mediocrity that’s not nearly as good as I wanted it to be or that it needed to be. One can’t help but wonder what a better director could have done with such dramatically potent material.

The film suffers because it looks like a tv movie. This rather flat and dull aesthetic keeps the story dramatically constrained and so we are never drawn into it.

The performances are equally middling, with the lone exception being Rahim, who plays the riddle that is Sahir with a charm and humanity worthy of note.

Jodie Foster won a Golden Globe for her work as a defense attorney Nancy Hollander in the film but I found her performance to be rather banal. Shailene Woodley gives an equally lackluster performance as another lawyer Teri Duncan.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Marine Corps lawyer Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, who was assigned to be the prosecutor on Sahir’s case. Cumberbatch deploys a Southern accent to his Couch (who is a real person) and it is egregiously awful. When British actors miss on American accents, particularly New York and Southern accents, it is so mannered and lifeless as to be painfully distracting, and Cumberbatch’s butchering of the dialect is gruesome to behold. As I watched Cumberbatch lose his wrestling match with the Southern drawl I couldn’t help but wonder…were there no American actors available to play this part?

That said, while the movie isn’t worth paying $20 to see On Demand, I still recommend The Mauritanian when it becomes available for free if for no other reason than it is an important story that contains some vital lessons for our current turbulent time.

As Orwell taught us, “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”, and in the United States of Amnesia, our prodigiously propagandized populace is conditioned to be myopic in the moment and utterly blind to the past. This makes for a pliable citizenry that can be led around by their noses by a mainstream media designed to do just that. This is heightened by gullible Americans lacking the intellectual vim and vigor to swim against the powerful current of establishment narratives in a search for some semblance of truth.

Thankfully The Mauritanian is at least a visual aid to remind America of that which it is consistently capable, namely, brutal authoritarianism fueled by frantic emotionalism.

The film does a service by reminding viewers of a few critical things.

First that Guantanamo Bay prison is still open and people still languish there, despite Obama’s promises to close it when he became president in 2009.

Second, that al-Qeada and the U.S. were allies in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It doesn’t get into great detail or anything, but even that little bit of information might be shocking to those who’ve conveniently forgotten that fact (or never knew it in the first place) and other much more damning facts about America and al-Qaeda’s fruitful relationship, then and now.

And third, that war criminals like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Barrack Obama, and their immoral minions, have never been punished for their atrocities, which is an abomination considering those that exposed their crimes, such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, rot in prison or are forced to live in exile.

As The Mauritanian highlights, post 9-11 America went into a full-blown hysteria. The result of this hysteria was the Patriot Act, massive surveillance, rendition, torture and the mass murder and mayhem of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 America has only gotten more hysterical in the following two decades. In recent years we’ve had one mindless panic after another. There’s been the Russia panic, the #MeToo panic, and the racism/white supremacy panic…all of them delusions and illusions built on minimal evidence and fueled by irrationalism and self-righteous fanaticism.

These panics have been used to distort reality and manipulate people into fighting for draconian and totalitarian measures to combat them.

The most alarming hysteria is the new “domestic terrorism” panic that sprung up in the wake of the Q-Anon Capitol riot of January 6th.

In reaction to this Q-Anon clownshow the political establishment and media have gone full Spinal Tap and upped the hyperbole to 11…9-11 that is.

The delusional discourse that the Capitol riot was a 9-11 level event has led to politicians demanding a “9-11 Commission” type of investigation. I wonder if the new Q-Anon Commission, maybe headed by the new “Reality Czar”, will be as toothless as the contrived show trial that was the 9-11 Commission?

Watching The Mauritanian I couldn’t help but think that Washington and the mainstream media want to do to troublesome “conspiracy theorists”, traditionalists, Christians and Trumpists what Bush, Obama and company did to Mamadou Salahi…make them suffer and disappear. Unfortunately, many regular liberals who have either sold their souls or lost their minds, moral compass and way after years of being heavily propagandized and indoctrinated, wholeheartedly agree with this assessment.

This furor and frenzy over “domestic terrorists” and “white supremacy” is inversely proportional to the actual threat from these manufactured shadows dancing upon America’s cave wall. 

9-11 was a savage and heinous attack, but the U.S.’s over reaction to it brutalized innocent people and ended up transforming the brush fire of Islamic radicalism it was meant to extinguish into an inferno that engulfed the world and torched the Constitution. It seems very likely that a similar over-reaction to the Capitol Riot will result in the same counter conflagration on American soil, and the phantom threat of “right-wing radicals” and “white supremacists” will thus be made manifest.

In conclusion, The Mauritanian isn’t great but is worth watching because it serves a noble purpose, which is to remind Americans of their unquenchable thirst to demonize and dehumanize those they deem as terrorists. Though the targets are now different, America’s evil impulse is as powerful as ever, and so is its susceptibility to hysteria and rampant emotionalism…and that portends a terrifyingly dark future indeed.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Surreality of a Reality Czar in Post-Reality America

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 39 seconds

The establishment wants a Reality Czar in order to crush dissent and control people, not to unite us around a common truth.

The mainstream media and ruling elite really hate conspiracy theories and misinformation…except when they don’t.

On February 2nd, which ironically enough is Groundhog Day here in the U.S., the New York Times published an article titled, “How The Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis”.

It seems a very bad sign that America is now relying on Joe Biden, a geriatric Washington insider suffering from dementia, to solve a “reality” crisis.

In the article, writer Kevin Roose spoke with “experts” who offered suggestions about how to unify Americans around “reality” by stamping out “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation”.

One of the suggestions was that Biden should create a “Reality Czar” to oversee the dismantling of “disinformation” and the surveillance of “conspiracy theorists”.

That sounds like a great idea…I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

The problem with a “Reality Czar” is that America is a post-reality nation. Our culture has gone so far to the extreme in regards to embracing subjective experience over objective reality that some blow hard bureaucrat is not going to be able to tip the scales back towards the rational.

And of course, that is the point. The Biden administration doesn’t want to return America to objective reality, they want Americans to embrace the establishment’s reality…those are two very different things.

The establishment reality is the neo-liberal, corporate controlled, Military Industrial Complex reality that loathes being held to account for its continuous misdeeds and misinformation.

The establishment reality demands we accept the absurdly incomplete official story regarding the spate of assassinations in the 60’s (JFK, MLK, RFK) while refusing to declassify and un-redact the millions of government files on those topics it won’t let us see.

The establishment reality lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and gave us the hell of the Vietnam War.

The establishment reality lied to us about Iran-Contra and the death squads in Latin America. It also lied about its complicity in the drug trade while it the manufactured a War on Drugs.

The establishment reality refuses to declassify documents surrounding 9-11 and refused to investigate the funding for that attack. It also unleashed George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s “Dark Side”, which included the War on Terror, torture, massive surveillance, Gitmo, rendition and the Patriot Act.

The establishment reality was the one that told us Iraq had WMD’s and gave us the Iraq War, and continues to give us the War in Yemen and the carnage in Libya and across the globe.

It is often said that daylight is the best disinfectant but we are continuously kept in the dark, and the establishment, regardless of which party is in power, is a gangrenous limb and their lies and disinformation are much more toxic to America and the world than anything some Q-Anon clowns can conjure in their fever dreams.

It is pretty rich that The New York Times is running this article calling for a reality czar and bemoaning disinformation as they have long aided and abetted the establishment in their concealing of truth and distorting of objective reality.

Whether it be Walter Duranty and his lies for Stalin, or Judith Miller and her lies for Bush, the Times has proven over and over again that it isn’t a news organization, but a Praetorian Guard meant to protect the tyrants, oligarchs and aristocrats from the masses.

The establishment’s hatred of conspiracy theories is particularly amusing in light of what transpired over the last four years.

Am I the only one who remembers the Russiagate hysteria? Stories of dastardly Rooskies hacking into power grids and voting booths and using microwave weapons to attack Americans have been commonplace in the Times and across the mainstream media, and yet those “conspiracy theories” were not only accepted but embraced.

Would the new Reality Czar hold the Times accountable for those idiotic stories? Would MSNBC be chastised for Rachel Maddow’s conspiratorial ramblings? Would CNN be reprimanded for their “mostly peaceful protests” disinformation?

Would the Reality Czar target the scientists and medical experts who publicly proclaimed that it was ok to gather in large groups during the pandemic to protest for Black Lives Matter but not to protest against lockdown?

How about the trans activists who distort and contort both science and reality?

Would the Reality Czar target the new White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, especially considering her laughably ridiculous press conference from 2015 where with a straight face she stated the U.S. has a “long standing” policy against backing coups?

Of course not.

Like a paranoid schizophrenic, our political and media elite of both parties are constantly trying to convince people that their own devious delusions are the one true reality.

The Reality Czar would not be meant to actually squash misinformation and conspiracy theories, only the misinformation and conspiracy theories the establishment doesn’t like.

The “reality” is that the ruling elite are pushing the notion of rampant right wing domestic terrorists and the danger of conspiracy theories in an attempt to conceal their crimes and squash dissent, not to help objective “reality” flourish.

As Orwell told us, “Who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past.” The establishment wants to control the present, the past, the future and most of all you…and a Reality Czar is just the beginning.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Vice: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Although a cinematic misfire of sorts, it is worth seeing for the extraordinary performances and for the civics lesson.

Vice, written and directed by Adam McKay, is the story of the meteoric rise of former Vice President Dick and his Machiavellian use of power. The film stars Christian Bale as Cheney, with supporting turns from Amy Adams, Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell.

Vice is another one of those films of 2018 for which I had high hopes. I absolutely loved director Adam McKay’s last film, The Big Short, which brilliantly dissected the 2008 financial meltdown and I hoped that when he set his sights on Dick Cheney he would be equally effective in his vivisection of that worthy target. McKay proved with The Big Short that he was more than capable of turning a dense, intricate, complex and complicated topic into an entertaining and enlightening movie, a skill that would be desperately needed for a film about Dick Cheney.

Watching Vice was an odd experience as I found the film had multiple great parts to it, but on the whole, while I liked it, I didn’t love it and ultimately found it unsatisfying. I was so confounded by my experience of Vice that I have actually seen it three times already to try and figure out specifically why I feel that it missed the mark and is not the sum total of its parts. And yes…I realize that seeing a movie I don’t love three times makes me sound insane.

Why am I so interested in figuring out why Vice is not great, you may ask? Well, the reason for that is that Vice desperately needed to be great because it is such an important film for the times in which we live. Trump did not come out of nowhere…he is a fungus that grew out of the shit pile that was Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush/Cheney and Obama…and as we all know, past is prologue, so if we don’t fully understand and integrate the lessons of Dick Cheney’s nefarious political career, we are doomed to stay stuck in the tyrannical rut in which we find ourselves.

Dick Cheney was a pivotal, behind the scenes player in American politics for four decades (70’s through the 00’s) and so bringing his sprawling yet mundanely bureaucratic career successfully to the screen is a massive and difficult undertaking. It is also an vital undertaking as the argument could be made, and Vice makes it, that Cheney’s underlying cosmology and his political and bureaucratic success are what has brought the U.S. and much of the world to the brink of collapse.

Sadly though, Vice is so structurally unsound as to be nearly untenable. McKay cinematically stumbles right out of the gate and makes some poor directorial decisions that lead to a lack of narrative coherence and dramatic cohesion that diminish the impact of this important movie.

I could not help but think of Oliver Stone as I watched Vice. Stone’s Nixon is an obvious cinematic parallel to Vice in that it is a bio-pic of a loathed political figure whose career spans multiple decades. The problem with Vice though is that McKay not only lacks Stone’s directorial skill and talent, he also lacks his testicular fortitude and artistic courage.

In Nixon, which is a terrific film you should revisit, Stone and his cinematographer, the great Robert Richardson, go to great lengths to show us Nixon’s point of view and perspective, and it works in drawing viewers into the man who otherwise may have repulsed them. Stone and Richardson occasionally used the technique of switching film stocks and going from color to black and white in order to distinguish Nixon’s point of view and to emphasize flash backs and time jumps. (Vice certainly could’ve used this sort of approach to make the time jumps it uses more palatable and cinematically appealing)

Of course, Stone was pilloried for his dramatic speculation in Nixon by the gatekeepers of Establishment thinking, but despite the critical slings and arrows, it was the proper creative decision. Stone turned Nixon into a Shakespearean character and we knew him and understood him much better because of it, which turned the film about his life into fascinating and gripping viewing.

Cheney, like his one-time boss Richard Nixon, is also cold and distant figure in real life, but McKay never emulates Oliver Stone and bridges that distance by using dramatic speculation in telling his story. McKay makes the fatal directorial error of only on the most rare of occasions allowing viewers into Dick Cheney’s head and giving them his distinct perspective and point of view. For the majority of the film the audience is forced to be simply spectators to Cheney’s villainy and not participants or co-conspirators, which undermines the dramatic power of the film.

The most interesting parts of the film are the two parts where we are actually given Cheney’s perspective and inner dialogue. The first time that happens is when we hear a voice over of Cheney’s thoughts as he meets with presidential candidate George W. Bush to talk about the Vice Presidency. In this scene we are given access to Cheney’s Macchiavellian musings about the man, Dubya, that he will use as an avatar to bring his dark vision to life, and it is intriguing.

McKay’s brief speculation of Cheney’s inner thoughts in the Bush scene propels the audience into Cheney’s head…which is where we should have been all along. We are then ushered out as soon as we arrive and are left with only a bird’s eye view of Cheney’s world until the final scene. Vice would have benefited greatly from McKay throwing the audience into Cheney’s head from the get go, but instead we get a rehash of Cheney’s greatest hits, or worst hits, depending on your political point of view, which is neither illuminating nor gripping. ( to be fair, McKay’s refusal to speculate on Cheney’s inner thoughts and motivations could be a function of the fact that Cheney is still alive and able to sue, but regardless of the reason, it does a terrible disservice to the cinematic enterprise)

McKay was obviously going to great lengths trying to be “historically accurate” in this bio-pic, but he falls into the trap of many, if not most bio-pics, in that he tries to recreate history instead of creating cinematic drama. McKay simply shows a series of well-known events in Cheney’s life (hey…remember that time Cheney shot somebody in the face!) without any new or interesting insights into them. In this way, Vice is less a drama/comedy than it is a docu-dramedy that merely skims the surface of its subject and re-tells history for those who already agree with its political perspective.

The biggest hurdle though in telling the story of Dick Cheney is…well…Dick Cheney. When your film’s lead character suffers from an egregious charisma deficit and has created a persona of impenetrable banality, you have quite a hill to climb. Besides mastering the art of dullness, Cheney is also an unlikable and politically despicable person, which only adds to the burden that this film must carry. Unlike in The Big Short, where McKay was able to use multiple characters to propel the narrative, each one different and interesting in their own right, in Vice, McKay is forced to have Cheney be the sole focus and driver of the narrative.

As vacant a character as Dick Cheney is, Christian Bale makes him a genuine human being. Bale disappears into Cheney and crushes the role to such an extent that he solidifies his place amongst the best actors working today. Bale’s confident use of stillness and silence is volcanically potent. There is no wasted motion with Bale’s Cheney, and it is when he isn’t saying anything that he is saying everything. Bale fills Cheney with very specific and detailed intentions that radiate off of him and penetrate his intended target with deadly precision.

The rest of the cast do outstanding work as well. Amy Adams is simply one of the best actresses on the planet and her work in Vice is a testament to that fact. Adams’ first scene as Dick’s wife Lynne is so dynamically compelling I nearly jumped out of my seat. Right out of the gate Adams tells the viewer everything we need to know about Lynne, she is smart, tough and will not put up with any bullshit. Adams’ Lynne is insatiable when it comes to power, and she is the Lady MacBeth behind Dick’s throne. Amy Adams has given a plethora of great performances over her career, but she has never been better than she is as Lynne Cheney in Vice.

Sam Rockwell is also outstanding, playing the cocksure but dim-witted poseur of a president George W. Bush. Rockwell plays Bush as an unwitting moron and dupe who is so stupid he doesn’t know how stupid he really is. Cheney’s manipulation of Bush is seamless and entirely believable with Rockwell playing the insecure second generation President. Rockwell never falls into caricature with his Dubya, and fills this empty man with a delightful and at times poignantly meaningful nothingness.

Steve Carell is also great as the enigmatic Don Rumsfeld. Carell morphs into the irascible political climber Rumsfeld with ease and shows a deft touch in making Rummy a genuine human being, a sort of arrogant fly boy whose wings never get permanently clipped.

All in all, the entire cast do great work with Bale, Adams and Rockwell all deserving Oscar nominations for their work, and Bale and Adams very much deserving of the trophy.

As much as Adam McKay won the casting room, he did have other failures when it came to filmmaking. I am sure it is no coincidence that McKay hired editor Hank Corwin to work on his film, as Corwin edited Stone’s Nixon as well. Surprisingly since he was so good on Nixon, Corwin’s editing on Vice lacks a cinematic crispness and is one of the weak spots of the film. Corwin repeatedly uses a black screen for transitions which I found broke the pace and rhythm of the film and scuttled any dramatic momentum. Of course, this is not all Corwin’s fault, as McKay may have demanded that approach, but regardless of why it happened, it happened and the film suffers for it.

Another issue with the film was the use of a narrator. Well, to be more clear, it wasn’t the use of a narrator, but the choice of the narrator and how that character fit into the story. Jesse Plemons, a fantastic actor, plays the role of the narrator but it never quite comes together. Plemons is fine in the part, but considering the amount of information that needed to be passed along to the audience, a more direct and straight forward narrator would’ve been a better choice. Once again, Oliver Stone comes to mind and his mesmerizing opening to his masterpiece JFK, where Martin Sheen (and phenomenal editors Pietro Scalia and Joe Hutshing) masterfully set the complex stage for everything that follows.

As much as I was frustrated by McKay’s direction, there were some moments of brilliance. McKay’s use of Alfred Molina as a waiter explaining the crimes of the Bush administration was absolutely magnificent. His expanded exploration of the idea of the “Unitary Executive” was smart and well done too.

Other sequences by McKay that were simply sublime were when McKay would show the global and life altering power of the Presidency. In one sequence we see Nixon and Kissinger having a discussion about their Vietnam and Cambodia policy…and then we see the catastrophic results of that policy on regular people. The same thing occurs in relation to Bush and Iraq in one of the finer cinematic moments of the movie, where all of the power politics in America reduce people half way around the world to cower under a table in fear for their lives.

There was one other scene that is worth mentioning, and not because it is so great, but because it reveals something nefarious about the film itself. In one scene where the principals of the Bush administration, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice etc., are debating whether to invade Iraq or not, there is a bit of dialogue which states in essence that Israel is opposed to the U.S. invasion because it will destablize the region. This is historically completely inaccurate and entirely at odds with reality. Why would Adam McKay put this bit of Israeli misinformation into his film that purports to tell the truth about the Bush administration? I think I know the reason why…but that is an uncomfortable discussion for another day.

In conclusion, as much as I wanted to love Vice because it shares my vision of the world and of the Bush administration, I didn’t love it. Cheney, like Nixon before him, should have been prosecuted and imprisoned for his crimes, instead of having his lackeys turned into exalted talking heads on MSNBC and CNN. If Vice were better made, if it were more coherent, cohesive and effective in its storytelling, it could have done to the Bush/Cheney administration, what The Big Short did to Wall Street…exposed them bare for the repugnant, amoral and immoral criminal pigs that they are.

Sadly, Vice doesn’t rise to the challenge, and so the historical myopia that pervades our current culture will persist and prosper. Liberals will continue to think everything was great before Trump and that Trump is responsible for all that is wrong in the world…and thus they doom themselves to repeat the cycle that brought us Trump in the first place. Just like Nixon gave us Reagan and Reagan gave us Clinton and Clinton gave us Bush/Cheney and Bush/Cheney gave us Obama and Obama gave us Trump…Trump will birth us another monster and it will devour us all unless we wake up and understand that it isn’t the individual that is rotten, it is the system that is rotting.

With all of that said, if you get a chance I do recommend you go see Vice, it is worth seeing for the exquisite performances of Bale, Adams and Rockwell alone. It is also worthwhile to see Vice to understand that as much as we’d like to blame others, be it Russians, Republicans or Democrats for all of our troubles, the truth is that Cheney bureaucratically maneuvered to give us the fascist tyranny for which we were clamoring. The fight is simply over who gets to control it the beast that is devouring us, and to see how much we can make selling rope to those who wish to hang us. My one solace to this national existential crisis is revenge, and the hope that I will get to see Dick Cheney and the rest of his gang at the end of one of those ropes before I die.

©2019